Questions APR 21

 Chapters/Arguments #19-27.  Presentation: Markeem. [NOTE: Markeem is presenting an alternative text/topic.]

1. Which chapter this week do you find most interesting? Which argument most compelling? 
2. Does Cass seem to be losing his infatuation with Klepper and Lucinda? How would you describe the arc of his character development and personal growth?
3. Is Roz right, that indoctrinating children with religious dogma while denying them a standard secular education or "the tools to think for themselves" is an immoral and abusive form of zealotry? 205-6   If so, what should be done about it?
4. Do Azarya's family and sect really value education? 207  Are children born Jewish, Catholic, Southern Baptist, "Valdener," etc.?  Should we recognize a freedom from religion, as well as a freedom for it?
5. Does Huxley's "Young Archimedes" make the point Roz thinks it does? 210
6. Comment?: "Letting the imagination run away is what fiction writers do." 211
7. Should clerics of any faith ever be regarded as "closer to the divine than other mortals"? 213  Should priesthood (or any other spiritually officious status) be hereditary?  216
8. When is it ever (un)healthy for humans to think of themselves as "one large organism"? 215
9. What do you make of the concept of a redemptive and purifying fire? If that's a metaphor, how would you explicate it? 216-7 
10. What do you think of Abraham's "wordless" willingness to sacrifice his child? 218   Even if you believed in the authority of the voice you thought you heard commanding such a sacrifice, would you really have nothing to say about it? What do you think of Kierkegaard's analysis of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages, forms, or dimensions of life?
11. What do you understand to be the meaning of claiming that maloychim are infinite, "without end" and "here, everywhere, in everything"? 218-19
12. Do you prefer the "intellectualized" or the "experiential" (etc.) form of religion/spirituality? 220  Is it possible to value and practice both?
13. Comment?: "gratitude for having been born Valdeners" 221--Were they? (See #4 above)  Is there something chauvinistic about this attitude, as (for instance) when people express pride at having been born American, British, French, or whatever?
14. Can one "wonderful child" prove anything about a tradition's espoused beliefs? 222
15. Do you enjoy debates between believers and non-believers? Do they serve any useful purpose, aside from entertainment? (See the highly entertaining late Christopher Hitchens...)   Any comment on the late-life friendship of Hitchens and protestant minister Larry Taunton? An excerpt: 

    Your book is titled The Faith of Christopher Hitchens. What do you mean by ‘The Faith’?

    We all have a faith in something. As strange as it may sound, atheists also have faith. They have faith that there is no God and they have faith that their own world view will ultimately be validated.

    Christopher recognised that atheism in itself is nothing. He was searching for that thing that might ultimately sustain and give meaning to his life. Patriotism came to be something that was very important to him. He was also a strong believer in science.

    Towards the end of his life, Christopher began exploring the Christian faith. After the publication of God Is Not Great, he began engaging evangelicals. He would make a show of asking these questions [supposedly] for investigative reasons, but I think he was personally investigating questions he had about the validity of the Bible and what it is that makes evangelicals tick.

    Christopher and I took two lengthy road trips after his cancer diagnosis, and during those trips we studied the Gospel of John for three or four hours. There would be those who say Christopher didn’t want to do that. Well, if he didn’t, he had an odd way of showing it, because he sought me out and sought out these kinds of engagements.

    But he did famously say that if he ever made a religious confession it would be because the cancer had gone to his brain.

    Yes, the very first time Christopher said that was on a US television show. Shortly afterwards I was talking to him on the phone and I said, ‘What’s up with: “If I convert the cancer has gone to my brain”?’ He seemed a little embarrassed by it...

16. Do liberals and conservatives ("neocons") generally contradict each other without giving thoughtful consideration to what has actually been said? Do they think skepticism is okay for intellectuals but not for "the teeming masses"? 226   Does this remind you of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor? Sample quotes: “Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”
17. What do you think "Socratic slyness" means? 229
18. If Freud is as far as Klapper would "venture in the direction of the hard sciences," is he scientifically illiterate? 
19. What does "sublime" mean to you? [MIT]  230
20. Does Klapper have a point about "dullards" who shouldn't be in college? 231  Should anyone ever turn over the task of thinking and learning to someone else (like a Rebbe)?  Any comment on this passage from Kant's essay What is Enlightenment?: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.[2] Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes),[4] nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me..."
21. What do you think of Klapper's potato fixation?
22. Have you figured out who GR613@gmail.com is? 237
23. Comment?: "The fragility of children is the most terrifying part of this whole terrifying world." 240
24. Comment?: "Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to." 244
25. Should brain and cognitive science undertake "the study of Man"?  250
26. Is Roz right about Cass's proposal? 256
27. Should religion and philosophy be "more about deed than creed"? 260  Should religion free you from the "mundane choices of your physical existence" but "not bother you too much about your beliefs"? 
28. Can anyone's mind have "traveled infinities" by age 16? 267
29. Again: is Pascale's understanding of probability confused? And is her name, in that light, a coincidence? 269  (See Pascal's Wager)
30. Is it surprising that Azarya likes Bach? 271
31. In light of the themes of play in Playground and game theory in 36 Arguments, what do you think of Molly Worthen's statement that "serious intellectual work and moral responsibility cannot be gamified." Would our authors agree?
32. Do you think Claude can get religion? 
33. Enough from me. You? Here are some questions from Claude:

## Chapter 19

1. Is academic celebrity a form of charisma that substitutes for genuine intellectual authority? How does Goldstein use Roz to probe the relationship between brilliance, ambition, and moral seriousness?
1. Does Cass’s relationship with Roz sharpen or complicate the question of whether intellectual achievement is a zero-sum game?
1. Roz is a public intellectual who thrives on controversy and visibility. Is there something philosophically suspect about wanting a wide audience — or is the desire to persuade many people a mark of genuine philosophical commitment?
1. What does the Cass-Roz dynamic suggest about the relationship between romantic love and intellectual rivalry? Can two people who compete for the same kind of recognition sustain genuine intimacy?

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## Chapter 20

1. Goldstein’s novel is itself an extended argument — yet its most powerful moments resist argumentative form. Does the novel enact its own thesis about the limits of rational persuasion?
1. Can you construct an argument that *arguing* is sometimes irrational — and does that argument refute itself?
1. Is there a difference between being *convinced* by an argument and being *moved* by one? Which matters more in questions of religious belief?
1. Goldstein is herself a philosopher writing fiction. Does that dual identity give her special authority on the question of reason’s limits — or does it create a conflict of interest?

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## Chapter 21

1. Klapper is brilliant, charismatic, and morally catastrophic. Is this combination accidental, or does Goldstein suggest something structurally dangerous about a certain kind of intellectual grandiosity?
1. Does Klapper’s fall resolve or deepen the tension between his regard for women and his interest in “gynecologico-cosmogony”?
1. Klapper’s students are drawn to him despite — or because of — his excesses. What does this say about the psychology of discipleship? Is there a meaningful difference between a great teacher and a charismatic cult leader?
1. Is intellectual hubris a specifically philosophical vice, or is it equally at home in religion, politics, and science?

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## Chapter 22

1. Cass lacks “snarky anti-theological ire” and genuinely respects religious sensibility. Does his respectful atheism make him a better or worse critic of religion than a Dawkins or Hitchens? What does Goldstein seem to think?
1. Does Cass’s position on God as metaphor vs. God as fact implicitly take a side — or does it deliberately float above the question?
1. Is it possible to respect a belief you think is false? Or does genuine respect require remaining genuinely open to the possibility that the belief is true?
1. Cass is professionally invested in the arguments for God’s existence without personally accepting any of them. Is this a form of intellectual integrity — or a kind of bad faith?

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## Chapter 23

1. Does Azarya’s dilemma — genius vs. community obligation — suggest that intellectual gifts carry moral weight? Do the Lamedvavniks have a claim on him?
1. Is it ethical to sacrifice one person’s extraordinary potential for the preservation of a community’s way of life? Is this a utilitarian question, a deontological one, or something else entirely?
1. Azarya’s situation inverts the usual story of the gifted child escaping a limiting environment. Does Goldstein want us to see the Valdener community as a prison, a paradise, or something more ambiguous?
1. What obligations, if any, do we have to communities that shaped us — even when we have outgrown them, or when their values conflict with our own?

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## Chapter 24

1. The academic conference scene is one of Goldstein’s sharpest satirical set pieces. Is she suggesting that the institutional forms of intellectual life are themselves inimical to genuine philosophical inquiry? What would James or Dewey say?
1. Does Goldstein’s conference satire offer an implicit answer to the question of what counts as a “junk idea” — and do you agree with her diagnosis?
1. Is academic philosophy a form of secular religion — with its own orthodoxies, heresies, and rituals of belonging?
1. The conference brings together people who disagree profoundly but share a professional language and set of conventions. Is that common ground philosophically valuable, or does it paper over deeper incommensurabilities?

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## Chapter 25

1. The novel resists clean resolution. Is this a philosophical or an aesthetic choice — or are those the same thing for Goldstein?
1. Does the novel’s ending confirm, complicate, or subvert the idea that “lost paradises are the only paradises there are”?
1. What does it mean for a novel about arguments to end not with a conclusion but with a mood? Is Goldstein making a point about the relationship between philosophy and literature?
1. Does irresolution in fiction model something important about how we should hold our deepest beliefs — or is it an evasion of the very rigor the novel seems to demand?

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## Chapter 26

1. Does Goldstein ultimately endorse a form of “secular grace” — a this-worldly analog to religious transcendence? If so, what are its sources and conditions?
1. How does Goldstein answer, by the novel’s close, whether “having to deal with the world” threatens spirituality or is actually its proper condition?
1. Can wonder survive the death of God? What would it be wonder *at*, and wonder *for*?
1. Is the experience of beauty — in persons, in ideas, in the world — a sufficient basis for a life well lived, in the absence of religious conviction?

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## Chapter 27

1. What, finally, does Goldstein mean by the novel’s title? Are the 36 arguments for God’s existence analogous in any way to the 36 Lamedvavniks — hidden sustainers whose hiddenness is precisely the point?
1. If you were Cass, would you be at peace with your position at the novel’s end? Is philosophical clarity a form of happiness — or its obstacle?
1. Goldstein ends with Cass rather than with any of the novel’s more conventionally “dramatic” characters. What does this choice imply about where she locates moral and philosophical seriousness?
1. Is the examined life — Cass’s life — a happy one? Does the novel finally endorse Socrates, or quietly mourn him?

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## Appendix Arguments 19–36 (Selected)

1. **Argument from Moral Truth (Arg. 20):** If objective moral truths exist, does God provide the best explanation for them — or does pragmatic moral philosophy (James, Dewey, Addams) offer a secular grounding that is equally robust?
1. **Argument from Moral Truth (Arg. 20):** Is the existence of moral disagreement across cultures evidence *against* objective moral truth — or simply evidence of our imperfect access to it?
1. **Argument from Personal Identity (Arg. 23):** Does the persistence of a “self” across time require a soul? Or does William James’s stream of consciousness offer a naturalistic account that renders the theological inference unnecessary?
1. **Argument from Personal Identity (Arg. 23):** If there is no enduring self, who — or what — is it that seeks God, or rejects God? Does the argument from personal identity presuppose what it sets out to prove?
1. **Argument from Qualia (Arg. 25):** The “hard problem” of consciousness — the felt quality of experience — has been called a gap that science cannot close. Is that gap an opening for theology, or simply an invitation to philosophical humility?
1. **Argument from Qualia (Arg. 25):** Is the felt quality of religious experience itself a form of qualia — and if so, does that make it more or less credible as evidence for God’s existence?
1. **Argument from the Existence of Philosophy (Arg. 27):** The very impulse to ask ultimate questions has been offered as evidence of a transcendent dimension to human life. Do you find this persuasive — or is the impulse sufficiently explained by evolutionary or pragmatic accounts?
1. **Argument from the Existence of Philosophy (Arg. 27):** If asking ultimate questions is distinctively human, does that make philosophy a spiritual practice — even in its most secular forms?
1. **Argument from Sublimity (Arg. 30):** Does the experience of the sublime — in mathematics, music, or nature — point beyond itself, or is its this-worldly character precisely what makes it sublime?
1. **Argument from Sublimity (Arg. 30):** Edmund Burke and Kant distinguished the beautiful from the sublime. Is God, if God exists, more beautiful or more sublime — and does the distinction matter theologically?
1. **Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness (Arg. 33):** Does Damasio’s embodied feeling framework dissolve this argument, or does it relocate rather than resolve the mystery?
1. **Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness (Arg. 33):** If consciousness is genuinely inexplicable by physical science, does that make panpsychism, theism, or agnosticism the most reasonable response?
1. **Argument from Moral Responsibility (Arg. 36):** Does holding humans morally responsible require libertarian free will — and does libertarian free will require God? Or can a pragmatic, naturalistic account of agency bear the full weight of moral life?
1. **Argument from Moral Responsibility (Arg. 36):** If we cannot be held ultimately responsible for who we are — our genes, our upbringing, our neurology — what remains of the concepts of praise, blame, guilt, and forgiveness?

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## Synthesis Questions *(for end of novel)*

1. Looking across all 36 arguments: which one do you find most intellectually serious? Which most emotionally compelling? Are those the same argument?
1. Does Goldstein think any of the 36 arguments *work* — or is the Appendix itself an elaborate act of secular mourning for arguments that almost, but never quite, close?
1. Cass is a philosopher of religion who neither believes nor dismisses. Is that a stable position — philosophically, existentially, personally? Is it *your* position?
1. The novel is dedicated to argument, yet it is also a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a comedy of manners. Do these genres finally support or undermine each other — and what does their coexistence say about the limits of any single mode of truth-telling?
1. If Goldstein were to add a 37th argument — one she finds most compelling, or most honest — what do you think it would be? What would yours be?